


Scrabble

by tatooedlaura



Series: Life [13]
Category: The X-Files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-19
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 21:56:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8595328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tatooedlaura/pseuds/tatooedlaura
Summary: “Whatever.” He gave her a wink, though and waved towards the board, “your turn, smarty pants.”





	

“Cat? Seriously?”

“You got something better there, Sparky?”

Mulder looked at his jumble of crap and shook his head, “I can spell ‘in’.”

“This is going to be the mother of all Scrabble games, Mulder, I can feel it.”

He gave her a twinkling look, “bring it on.”

Eventually, they moved to larger words, the score fluctuating back and forth, Mulder crushing it with a 50-pointer, then, mid-gloat, Scully knocked him down a notch or two with a 55-pointer. The trash talk was excessive, vulgarity flying, Latin being flung from Scully to counter Mulder’s atrociously pronounced Italian and French expletives.

Laughing, Mulder gained another 14 points before settling back against the couch cushion, “You do realize I have no idea what you just said to me, right? ‘Cause it’s in Latin.”

After recording his score, “I said, ‘wrongly captured, properly detained’.”

“You are too smart for your own good.”

“Yet you keep me around anyways.”

“Whatever.” He gave her a wink, though and waved towards the board, “your turn, smarty pants.”

As she began laying out some atrociously long word meant to annihilate her partner for good, “what will you do if I win?”

“Pout like a child, petulantly kicking things and turning over the board to scatter the tiles and then blow raspberries at you because you can’t prove you won and we’ll have to play again at which time I will leave you so far in the dust you’ll have grit in your teeth for a week.”

Her eyes strained up at him, her hand stopping in the middle of laying her letter ‘x’ on the triple word score, “that was a very distinctly specific answer for being impromptu and completely un-premeditated.”

“I really like to win.”

Slyly moving her hand to the edge of the board to hold it steady, she kept her eye on him as she finished her word, “97 points. You touch this board and you’ll wake up tomorrow with M&Ms in your ears, I swear to God.”

“You shouldn’t swear to God, Scully.”

“I’m pretty sure he’ll be on my side for this one.”

The staring contest between them lasted more than a minute until Scully slowly began backing away, holding the board still in her hand but moving back from it one slow centimeter at a time.

He continued to watch her with amused interest until she was fully upright, sitting more like Scully and less like Quasimodo, “you’ve got the board memorized, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

Mulder spelled out ‘nerd’ and took his loss graciously 10 minutes later.

&&&&&&&&&&

Their second game, in which Mulder declared swear words legal as well as slang and body parts, he won by a landslide. The third was abandoned in favor of the last two slices of pizza eaten by the glow of the fishtank, “I am having a thought.”

Using his leg as a napkin, Scully wiped the crumbs off her hands before settling back, knees tucked under her and hands now sandwiched between her thighs, “just one?”

“It’s late and my multi-tasking abilities are gone.” Swinging his legs around, he propped them on her bent knees, head back against the armrest, “would you like to hear my thought?”

Glad his socks were clean, she left them there without complaint, “yes, I would.”

“When I was looking at the map earlier, I realized that we’ve been all over the damn country and we’ve never actually gotten to see any of the damn country. The closest we’ve come is our foiled attempt with the Liberty Bell and that’s a pretty shitty track record for six years.”

Too tired and too comfortable to think too hard, she nodded, then pulled out one of her hands in order to play with the hole in his sock, amused by how warm his big toe felt against her finger, “planning on remedying that?”

Shutting his eyes, he let a slow smile spread across his face, “we planned our trip to Australia so now I think we need to plan one closer to home; stay in the lower 48, tool around in the car, catch all that roadside stuff we always drive past the billboards for.”

“You mean like giant balls of twine and Big Blue?”

“Exactly. World’s biggest collection of cuckoo clocks, mystery spots, museums dedicated to Rubik’s Cubes and Nutcrackers, the list is endless, Scully, it’ll take us months.”

“Can we also maybe go see some national monuments, historical things, Grand Canyon?”

“Anywhere you want. Just name it and we’ll go.”

Beginning her massage of his foot, “so, what have you always wanted to go see?”

&&&&&&&&&&&

They talked all night, having abandoned lying on the couch for sitting beside each other, laptop open, knees, thighs, stocking toes, hips and arms touching, blanket across their legs, Scully writing things down, Mulder navigating through the internet.

Together, they never even noticed the sun coming up, the room gradually getting lighter while their brains got more and more tired, Scully’s penmanship suffering great demise at the hand of weariness. When her pen moved right off the paper and down to the couch mid-word, Mulder shut the computer, “you realize you just fell asleep, right?”

“Huh?”

“You were in the middle of writing,” twisting his head to see, “Alcatraz, which does not now nor will ever contain an ‘x’, man, you are tired, and your pen just slid right off the paper.”

Scully looked at him with the blankest look he’d ever seen on her, “I have absolutely no idea what you just said.”

“Go to bed, would you?”

Tossing the paper onto the floor, she stood, stumbling past him, nearly tripping on his feet, “going.” As she passed him, she reached out for his hand, “you, too.”

He took it briefly, then let her go again, “I’ll be there in a minute. I need to go to the bathroom.”

With something resembling a nod, she wandered unsteadily to the bedroom, while he went to pee.

Just as he stopped in the kitchen for a last drink of water, he heard his phone vibrate faintly from somewhere in the living room. Fighting the urge to ignore it, his duty to king, country and paycheck sent him in search of what could only be Skinner calling.

A few minutes later, Mulder sat down on the edge of the bed, touching her shoulder gently, “Scully? Scully, I need you to wake up.”


End file.
